A Place to Play, on Wheels or Feet

By Tina Rosenberg

Dec. 5, 2017

Video

What happens when children of all different abilities get to play with each other? We take you inside a first-of-its-kind ultra accessible water park, which is changing the way families spend time together.

In 2006, while on a family vacation, Gordon Hartman, a San Antonio home builder, went to a hotel swimming pool with his daughter, Morgan. She was born with physical and cognitive disabilities; at 12, she had the cognitive age of a young child. Other children were swimming as well, two of them throwing a ball. As Hartman tells it, Morgan slowly made her way to them, and not being verbal, hit the ball. The frightened children collected their ball and scrambled out of the pool.

Morgan turned to her dad. “I see her face going, ‘What is up? What? Why?’ ” said Hartman. He jumped in the water to play with her, musing on a conversation he and his wife, Maggie, had all the time: where can we take Morgan to have fun where she can feel comfortable?

When adults think of providing for a child with special needs, first on the list are necessary basics: health care, mobility, accessible education. But a child is likely to mention a different sort of need — she might say that the worst thing about a disability is that it gets in the way of fitting in, being accepted by the group and being able to play with friends.

Disability is far more common than many people realize. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22 percent of American adults live with some kind of disability. (The survey didn’t count children.) Morgan was not the only child who had no place to play and feel comfortable. So Hartman built one.

Four years after the swimming pool incident, he opened Morgan’s Wonderland amusement park in an old limestone quarry in northeast San Antonio. Last spring, a companion water park, Morgan’s Inspiration Island, opened next door. Hartman’s foundation also funds Straps, which runs sports leagues for people with disability, and the Academy, a school for children with special needs, which is adjacent to the park.

At traditional amusement parks, many people with special needs must sit at a picnic table, watching others have fun. That was the case for Sammi Haney, an 8-year-old with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. She was born with 19 fractures, and breaks a bone about every other month. She’s had numerous operations to put metal rods in her body to support her long bones — she’s now recovering from surgery to straighten and strengthen her spine with a metal rod. As her condition causes dwarfism, she is both fragile and small.

Sammi and her brother, sister and parents have visited several amusement parks. At Disney World, she could sit with her mother on a few rides, such as the Haunted Mansion. “But it was more shows and looking at things,” her mother, Priscilla Haney, said.

At Six Flags Fiesta Texas in San Antonio, near her home, one of the few rides Sammi could use was Scooby-Doo Ghostblasters. She rode a train through a haunted house and shot a laser gun at ghouls. She did that 15 times. “The next time we went, she had her leg bandaged because she had had a tibia fracture,” said Haney . The park didn’t allow Sammi on the Scooby-Doo ride.“So we did the Ferris wheel, but it wasn’t fun, you know — it was just up and down.”

At Morgan’s Wonderland and Inspiration Island, people with special needs can do every ride. They are gentler than the typical ride in a traditional park — there’s no roller coaster nor any stomach-churning 150-foot drops. Rides have tie-downs to secure wheelchairs, even on swings and the up-and-down platforms on the carousel.

Inspiration Island has five splash pad playgrounds, one of them with warm water. (For safety, the park has no deep water.) Children can get soaked by a giant tipping bucket, conduct spray-gun fights, or splash with geysers or squirting sea horses — all with handles to control the intensity of water flow. People with ventilators can get special bags to keep them dry. Radio tracker bracelets protect children who might be prone to wander.

One afternoon in August, Sammi was laughing and smiling as she soaked her brother, John, with a water sprayer. “When I watch my children play together, it makes me happy that they are able to have experiences that they can remember when they’re older,” said Haney. “And that they’ll always have that, no matter how long Sammi is with us.”

Morgan’s Wonderland and Inspiration Island are not parks for people with disabilities, Hartman emphasized; only one in four guests has a special need. (Some are adults with disabilities who want to play with their able-bodied children.) They are parks of inclusion, where everyone can participate together. Visitors have come from 67 countries and every state. Children with special needs get free admission. The top price for everyone else is $17, with many discounts. The parks were expensive to build: Morgan’s Wonderland cost $36 million and loses $1 million per year, said Bob McCullough, a spokesman. Inspiration Island cost $17 million. It’s too new to track losses.

Bella Edwards, 9, lives an 70-minute drive from Morgan’s. Sue Chevalier Idskou, her grandmother, has taken Bella and her own daughter, Bella’s aunt Skye, who is 10 and able-bodied, to Morgan’s Wonderland at least twice a week for the last three years. The three also visited Inspiration Island more than 20 times over the past summer. Right now, Bella is rehearsing in Morgan’s Wonderland’s Christmas play. She has told Idskou she would like to live in the parks.

Bella was born with spina bifida. She uses a wheelchair, but has recently begun walking using forearm crutches and leg braces.

At other parks, she said: “I feel alone because nobody wants to play with me. They think I’m weird. When I come here, everybody wants to play with me. Like I made this friend with a little girl — her name is Amelia. I thought she was cute and I just really walked up to her and said, ‘Hi, I’m Bella,’ and I took her hand and was like, ‘Come on, let’s go play.’ And then all of a sudden we were playing together.”

Does that happen elsewhere or just here?

Just here, she said.

Bella also plays on Straps’ wheelchair basketball team, which practices at Morgan’s. Skye comes along, and the team includes her during practices; she takes a wheelchair and plays, too.

A few weeks ago, Skye and Bella were at their elementary school after hours with Idskou and wanted to play in the playground. “One person has to hold Bella at the top of the slide and one has to catch her,” said Idskou. Bella can’t land on her feet. She has amazing core muscles but doesn’t have the stability the average child does. She would have to go into one of the baby swings.

“At Morgan’s, she has a choice of cradle seat swings or a swing she can roll onto in wheelchair,” Idskou said. The slide has ramps to wheel up or walk with their crutches. The monkey bars have rollers underneath so kids can rest their legs but use their arms like regular monkey bars. I don’t have to carry her everywhere. I don’t have to lift her on to everything. She has the freedom just to go and play.”

When Hartman was developing Inspiration Island, he realized that a water park accessible for all required motorized wheelchairs that could get wet. Those didn’t exist.

He turned to the Human Engineering Research Laboratories, which is a project of the University of Pittsburgh and Veterans Affairs’ Pittsburgh Health Care System. The lab invents technology to improve mobility and function for people with disabilities. The founder and director is Rory Cooper, an electrical and computer engineer — and an Army veteran who has used a wheelchair since a spinal cord injury in 1980.

The lab works on super high-tech and super low-tech projects — for example, low-cost easy-to-maintain wheelchairs for developing countries. It’s developing a wheelchair with sensors that can help prevent pressure ulcers, one that can climb a curb or go over a log, and one that can transfer a user from bed to wheelchair and back.

Hartman had Cooper visit Morgan’s Wonderland and look at plans for the water park. “I think we have a solution for you,” Cooper told him.

The lab was in the last stages of creating a pneumatic wheelchair — one propelled purely by compressed air. Brandon Daveler, a doctoral student leading the project (he’s been a quadriplegic since a motorcycle accident at age 15), compared it to letting the air out of a balloon and using that to turn a windmill. The pneumatic chair is half the weight of a normal power chair, much faster to charge, and easy to fix with parts from a hardware store.

But what made it useful for Hartman was that the chair had no batteries or electronics that could be damaged by water. To clean it, you hose it down.

The pneumatic chair is not yet mass-produced. Inspiration Island has four, and plans to have 10 when it reopens in the spring. (The park has plenty of manual wheelchairs, and since most users don’t come alone, they have someone who can push them if necessary.)

Both the lab and Inspiration Island have been inundated with requests from people who want a waterproof chair for recreation. That took Cooper by surprise. “All the things that people want to do — water parks, wave pools, beaches, wade into the water to go fishing, super-soaker fights in the front yard, water balloon fights — it reminds me just how much both water and fun have a part in our life and how much that’s truly missed by people when they have to use powered mobility devices,” he said.

“I’m not even sure that the people that are now using the PneuChair in Morgan’s Inspiration Island or that have tried the chair here in Pittsburgh realized how much they missed being able to do those things, or how much their family wished that they could be included in those things — until a solution was available,” he said. “It’s not only about fun, it’s actually about being part of the community, and about inclusion.”